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If electric cars never really take off in popularity, how about
the flip side? Electrified roads.

Previous ideas with electrified roads required a coil to be
attached to the car, which is unreasonable if the car is moving.
Now, researchers at Toyota
Central R&D Labs and Toyohashi University of
Technology are looking into a method where the energy would
enter the car from the road through the tires, which are always
in contact with the ground. New Scientist has more on the research:

Such technology would allow electric cars to forgo their heavy
batteries, which not only add to a vehicle’s weight, increasing
the energy needed to move it, but also force it to sit idle
while recharging.

. . .

To test how much energy would be lost as electricity travelled
through the tyres’ rubber, [Masahiro] Hanazawa and
[Takashi] Ohira set up a lab experiment in which they put
metal plates on the floor and inside a tyre. “Less than 20
percent of the transmitted power is dissipated in the circuit,”
says Ohira.

With enough power the system could run typical passenger cars,
says Ohira, and the team are now developing a small-scale
prototype to prove it. He admits, however, that the system’s
energy loss is “much higher than regular batteries.”

Electrified roads pose an obvious problem for pedestrians —
there’s no rocking on this electric avenue. New Scientist reports
John Boys, an electrical engineer at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand, as saying that as much as 500,000 volts would be
needed to power cars in the way Ohira and Hanazawa would like.

“You wouldn’t want to step on that,” he says.

New Scientist also notes infrastructure investment and
radio-frequency interference as limitations to this idea.